The White Queen Read online

  Three beautiful daughters, we have, one newborn, and we are hoping—with rising anxiety—for a son, when Edward gets news of a rebel in Yorkshire calling himself Robin. Robin of Redesdale, a fanciful name meaning nothing, a petty rebel hiding himself behind a legendary name, raising troops, slandering my family, and demanding justice and freedom and the usual nonsense by which good men are tempted from minding their fields to go to their deaths. Edward pays little attention at first, and I, foolishly, think nothing of it at all. Edward is on pilgrimage with my family, my Grey sons Richard and Thomas and his young brother Richard, showing himself to the people and giving thanks to God, and I am traveling to meet him with the girls and, though we write every day, we think so little of the uprising that he does not even mention it in his letters.

  Even when my father remarks to me that someone is paying these men—they are not armed with pitchforks, they have good boots and they are marching in good order—I pay him no attention. Even when he says, a few days later, that these are men who belong to someone: peasants or tenants or men sworn to a lord, I hardly listen to his hard-won wisdom. Even when he points out to me that no man takes up his scythe and thinks he will go and fight in a war; someone, his lord, has to give the order. Even then, I pay him no attention. When my brother John says that this is Warwick’s country and most likely the rebels are raised by Warwick’s men, I still think nothing of it. I have a new baby and my world revolves around her carved gold-painted crib. We are on progress in southeast England where we are beloved, the summer is fine, and I think, when I think at all, that the rebels will most likely go home in time to bring in the harvest, and the unrest will go quiet of its own accord.

  I am not concerned until my brother John comes to me, his face grave, and swears that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of men in arms, and it has to be the Earl of Warwick about his old business of making mischief, as no one else could muster so many. He is kingmaking again. Last time he made Edward to replace King Henry; this time he wants to make George, Duke of Clarence, brother to the king, the son of no importance, to replace my husband Edward. And so to replace me and mine as well.

  Edward meets me at Fotheringhay, as we had arranged, quietly furious. We had planned to enjoy the beautiful house and grounds in the midsummer weather and then travel on to the prosperous town of Norwich together, for a great ceremonial entry to this most wealthy city. Our plan was to knit ourselves into the pilgrimages and feasts of the country towns, to dispense justice and patronage, to be seen as the king and queen at the heart of their people—nothing like the mad king in the Tower and his madder queen in France.

  “But now I have to go north and deal with this,” Edward complains to me. “There are new rebellions coming up like springs in a flood. I thought it was one discontented squire, but the whole of the north seems to be taking up arms again. It is Warwick, it must be Warwick, though he has said not a word to me. But I asked him to come to me, and he has not come. I thought that was odd—but I knew he was angry with me—and now this very day I hear that he and George have taken ship. They have gone to Calais together. Goddamn them, Elizabeth, I have been a trusting fool. Warwick has fled from England, George with him; they have gone to the strongest English garrison, they are inseparable, and all the men who say they are out for Robin of Redesdale are really paid servants of George or Warwick.”

  I am aghast. Suddenly the kingdom that had seemed quiet in our hands is falling apart.

  “It must be Warwick’s plan to use all the tricks against me that he and I used against Henry.” Edward is thinking aloud. “He is backing George now, as he once backed me. If he goes on with this, if he uses the fortress of Calais as his jumping point to invade England, it will be a brothers’ war as it was once a cousins’ war. This is damnable, Elizabeth. And this is the man I thought of as my brother. This is the man who all but put me on the throne.This is my kinsman and my first ally. This was my greatest friend!”

  He turns from me so I cannot see the anger and the distress in his face, and I can hardly breathe at the thought of this great man, this tremendous commander of men, coming against us. You are sure? George is with him? And they have gone to Calais together? He wants the throne for George?”

  “I am sure of nothing,” he shouts in exasperation. “This is my first and foremost friend and with him is my own brother. We have been shoulder to shoulder on the battlefield; we have been brothers in arms as well as kinsmen. At the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross, there were three suns in the sky—I saw them myself, three suns: everyone said that was a sign from God for me and for George and for Richard, the three sons of York. How can one son leave the others? And who else betrays me with him? If I cannot trust my own brother, who will stand by me? My mother must know of this: George is her darling. He will have told her he is plotting against me and she has kept his secret. How can he betray me? How can she?”

  “Your mother?” I repeat. “Your mother, backing George against you? Why would she do such a thing?”

  He shrugs. “The old story. Whether I am my father’s son. Whether I am legitimate, born and bred a York. George is saying that I am a bastard, and that makes him the true heir. God knows why she would support this. She must hate me for marrying you and taking your part more than I even dreamed.”

  “How dare she!”

  “I can trust no one but you and yours,” Edward exclaims. Everyone else I trust is cut out from under my feet, and now I hear that this Robin in Yorkshire has a list of demands that he wants me to meet, and that Warwick has announced to the people that he thinks they are reasonable. Reasonable! He promises that he and George will land with an army to remonstrate with me. Remonstrate! I know what he means by that! Is this not the very thing we did to Henry? Do I not know how a king is destroyed? Did Warwick’s father not take my very own father to remonstrate with King Henry, planning to cut him from his wife and from his allies? Did he not teach my father how to cut off a king from his wife, from his allies? And now he thinks to destroy me with the same trick. Does he think that I am a fool?”

  “And Richard?” I ask anxiously, thinking of his other brother, the shy boy who has become a quiet and thoughtful young man. “Where are Richard’s loyalties? Does he side with his mother?”

  It is his first smile. “My Richard stays true to me, thank God,” he says briefly. “Richard is always true to me. I know you think him an awkward, sulky boy. I know your sisters laugh at him, but he is honest and faithful to me. Whereas George can be bribed to left or to right. He is a greedy child, not a man. God only knows what Warwick has promised him.”

  “I can tell you that,” I reply fiercely. “It’s easy. Your throne. And my daughters’ inheritance.”

  “I shall keep them all.” He takes my hands and kisses them. “I swear I shall keep them all. You go to the city of Norwich as we planned. Do your duty, play the queen, look as if you are untroubled. Show them a smiling and confident face. And I will go and scotch this snakes’ plot before it gets out of the ground.”

  “Do they admit that they hope to overthrow you? Or do they insist they just want to remonstrate with you?”

  He grimaces. “It is more that they will overthrow you, sweetheart. They want your family and your advisors exiled from my court. Their great complaint is that I am ill advised and that your family are destroying me.”

  I gasp. “They are slandering me?”

  “It is a cover, a mumming,” he says. “Don’t regard it. It is the usual song of this not being a rebellion against the king but against his evil advisors. I sang this song myself as did my father, as did Warwick against Henry. Then, we said that it was all the fault of the queen and the Duke of Somerset. Now, they say it is your fault and your family around you. It is easy to blame the wife. It is always easier to accuse the queen of being a bad influence than to declare yourself against the king. They want to destroy you and your family, of course. Then, once I am alone before them, without friends and family, they will destroy me. They will force me